Once fierce and bitter competitors, it took a life-threatening injury for Wayne Rainey and Eddie Lawson to discover just how close they've always been.

The rear tire steps out. The rider checks up. The bike threatens to stand up and buck the rider off the high side. He corrects again. The rear tire breaks loose. The engine shrieks to 13 grand. Redline! The rider cracks the throttle. The fight is over. The bike lies down. Things get very quiet.

The rider, a three-time world champion, is thrown, rudely, off the track.

"I was going about 130," remembered Wayne Rainey, who was in relentless pursuit of an unprecedented fourth straight world motorcycling title. "I was trying to put time on Kevin Schwantz. I was riding past my limit. I remember, in that instant--right when I'm laying the bike down--thinking, 'I just lost the world championship!'"

But leading the 500cc Grand Prix championship with just one race to go, and leading this event at Misano, Italy, his million-dollar contract as the world's top bike racer in hand--none of it would matter anymore, beyond that split second.

Motorcycle racers claim an unnatural ability to stay calmly focused on the task at hand--such as finding the softest spot on which to land--while crashes rip away fingers and toes, and grind tender flesh, particularly around elbows and knees, down to the bone.

"I went head over heels into a gravel trap," Rainey recalled. "I don't know how many times I flipped. It was a lot. After a while of this, I thought, 'Okay. I should be coming to a stop here sometime.'"

Amazingly, to this point, the horrifying series of endos that Rainey's body endured had failed to seriously injure him. But his luck would run out at the end of his tumble, as his recalcitrant 500cc Yamaha caught up with him and speared him in the back, right between the shoulder blades. To be exact, it drilled him in the sixth thoracic vertebra--a bone that had been crunched and weakened in a practice crash two races earlier. He did a headstand into the gravel, 60-to-0 in nothing flat.

The wounded vertebra snapped, severing Rainey's spinal cord. As he writhed in searing pain, the lights started to go out on his world. "My left eye went completely black, then my right eye." It was then--at 1:29 p.m. on September 5, 1993--that this lifeless racer decided it was time for a chat with God.

Life, as Wayne Rainey knew it, was over.

It's a crisp, dry late afternoon at Willow Springs Motorsports Park in Southern California. The sun, low on the horizon, bathes the scene with warm, exaggerated colors: gleaming whites and electric reds on the helmets and leathers of the racers; sparkling chrome, startlingly blond hair.

It is now the year 2000. But it seems as though it could be 30 years earlier.

Dark, taciturn Eddie Lawson, now 41, the only American to win the world 500cc championship four times, is relaxing in his garage area. A little entourage around him smiles as he trades dry one-liners with engine whiz Sandy Rainey. Sandy is Wayne's dad, and very much a surrogate father to Lawson.

Just then, the blond, charismatic matinee idol of motorcycle racing, Wayne Rainey, wheels up, ready to race. He looks the part in black, red, and white leathers and helmet.

"We've kind of come full circle since our club racing days," remarks Lawson.

Lawson and Rainey met in 1971 while racing 125cc dirt-track bikes. Rainey was 11, Lawson was 13. Because of their age difference, they raced each other only sporadically until 1988-92. "I was always a division or two ahead," Lawson said. But they traveled together--with Sandy as chaperone, at first. Then, when they were old enough to drive on public roads, it was just two teenage biker brats barnstorming the country. As their wins piled up, and their reputations grew, they moved farther up motorcycling's talent ladder until they each ended up riding the 500cc Grand Prix circuit. Head-to-head, Lawson won the '82 Superbike title and world titles in 1988 and '89; Rainey won three, from 1990 through '92.

But those days are long gone now; the bikes have been replaced by 250cc go-karts.

"The boys" once left a star-struck bevy of bimbos and groupies in their wake. Now, their pit crews include Eddie's steady, Julie Alfonso; Wayne's longtime wife, Shae, and their seven-year-old son, Rex. They're "family" now--a testament to a kinder, gentler lifestyle for these former juvenile delinquents--survivors of the unsafe-sex era.

But the cast of key characters--Sandy, Wayne, and Eddie--is essentially the same.

Rainey, now 39, smiles. "Dad went with us when we were growing up. Now, after all these years, we're back, and he's back with us."

On that level, little has changed. On another level, everything has changed.

In 1992, a burnt-out Lawson quit racing. Rainey didn't walk away--he had to be carried off. It's been more than six years since Rainey threw a leg over his motorcycle. Six years since he walked a step. Six long years.

Rainey has been paralyzed from mid-chest down since that disastrous day in Misano.

"I was lying there in pain," Rainey said, "and I felt this calm peace come over me. I knew I was slipping away. And that scared me. I asked God to come into my life and save me from this. Right when I did that, my vision, and all the pain, came back. It was really strange. It was like God said, 'Okay, if you wanna live this life, it's not gonna be easy. But I'm gonna let you live.' Every breath I took after saying that prayer, it was a struggle to get the next one. But I thought if I could get the next breath, I could live. There was so much pain, so much of a battle just to get to the next breath, I almost went, 'I think it would be easier to go and not do this.' That's how close it was."

Instead, Rainey decided to accept what he felt was God's new challenge for him.

A six-month schedule of therapy lay ahead, to be followed by years of surgeries and grueling work to train his body to cope with his disability.

But in six months, Rainey was in charge of Yamaha's 250cc factory team on the Grand Prix circuit. Within two years, he had supplanted Kenny Roberts as operator of Yamaha's 500cc team. Looking back, Rainey now says, "I probably rushed things. I should've stayed home. For six years, I've been traveling the world, all over the place." It was too much for his battered body, which was prone to inopportune spasms, phantom pains, and cramps. In 1999, he finally retired to his home in Monterey, California--on a hilltop within sight of Rainey Corner at Laguna Seca Raceway. "It's great now. My body's really calming down. I feel so much better."

But for those six years, Rainey was two-wheeled racing's equivalent of his pen pal Frank Williams, the Formula 1 team owner who's also wheelchair-bound. Unlike Williams, who became a quadriplegic after a highway crash, Rainey still enjoys a full range of motion with both arms.

That gave Lawson, his old buddy from flat tracking, an idea.

"I thought if he could use his hands, he could drive a go-kart," Lawson recalls. So he took it upon himself to scrounge up the parts and pieces needed to build his friend a kart. "I thought it would be something to lift his spirits. I thought, 'We gotta do something to help him.'"

Lawson could empathize. Despite retiring relatively unscathed (both ankles shattered, a broken neck, and assorted mutilations), Lawson narrowly escaped paralysis in 1981. He walked around for days after a crash with his seventh cervical vertebra snapped before he finally got an X-ray to see why his neck still hurt. "I never thought I'd get hurt--even the times I did!" he grins.

Lawson, whose last pro ride was a stirring victory in the 1993 Daytona 200, spent his spare time over the next year modifying a Swift chassis with leg restraints and hand controls for his friend.

"I wanted to make it as much like a bike as possible. But it was real crude at first," Lawson laughs now. "Now, I call it the Mir space station."

It took Lawson nearly a year to convince his friend to try this home-built monster.

"I honestly didn't know if this was going to work," Lawson says. "But within three laps, he had it pegged, had it sideways and everything."

"Wow!" was about all Rainey could say after his maiden voyage. "This is fast!"

It's no coincidence the kart is about as fast as a GP bike. Lawson prevailed upon Yamaha, the longtime factory benefactors of both riders, to donate an exotic, expensive TZ250 road-racing engine to the cause. (Rainey was so touched, he got another from Yamaha for Lawson's kart.)

"It's, like, 85 horsepower from just a quarter-liter," Lawson says with a mischievous smile. "And of course, Sandy, who did the engines for Wayne's 250 team, had to go through it, too. He's totally tricked it out, so it's a missile!

"About the only thing I can equate it to is a Formula Atlantic, or an Indy Lights car," which Lawson raced in 1993-94. "But that's million-dollar stuff. We're talking five thousand bucks here. There's nothing you can do in racing that gives you such bang for the buck."

Sandy Rainey has also refined the hand grips, tuned and turned the handlebars, added air- and now electrically aided shifters, and a slave cylinder for the brakes. Bug Karts helped Lawson set up the chassis and suspension. Dan Gurney made a mold of Rainey's body in karting position and had a carbon-fiber seat fabricated and baked in the autoclave especially for Rainey's new Anderson chassis from England. A new carbon-fiber cowl is on order. This is serious stuff.

"Now Wayne wants the wheels moved, the chassis changed," Lawson groans. "He's back to his old self, being a pain in the ass again."

"Eddie's back to hisself, too, because he's always been a pain in the butt," laughs Rainey, who admits he's learned more studying Lawson than any other rider. "Eddie talks a lot, but usually what he complains about, he's doing, too. I know Eddie's always got all the good stuff."

The test, Lawson concedes, is to keep this level of karting--the International Karting Federation's Unlimited Class--a fun thing that he can enjoy with his old friend without spending themselves broke (although, as millionaires, that's not likely). Or worse, stoking their competitive fires to the point of hurting themselves or their friendship again. (That said, Lawson won his IKF class championship in '99.)

This friendship was almost ruined in 1989, when they were locked in a close championship battle. Rainey fell in the last race, and Lawson edged him for the title. As teammates in 1990, they refused to help each other much and hardly spoke.

When Lawson presented the kart, the gesture was so moving, it caught Rainey off guard. It was a touchy-feely kind of moment. Each barely knew what to say to the other. "I thought, 'Hey, Eddie, we're fierce rivals. We can't talk like this,'" Rainey recalls. "We weren't really very good friends when we were racing each other. But Eddie taught me that was gone, in the past.

"Even now, Eddie and I don't talk a lot about when we raced each other. He doesn't say, 'You know, I've got four world championships to your three, and now I can beat you at this.' It's back to the way we were when we were growing up."

That may have been true until 1999 and Rainey's "retirement." Now, he has time to take karting more seriously. Seriously enough to begin work with a personal trainer again to build his stamina and arm strength.

"Well, we didn't do this for Wayne to race," Lawson says, shaking his head. "We just wanted him to be able to have fun again. But his lap times were so good, pretty soon he was asking, 'When do you race?' So we went to some of the races, and he really surprised everybody with how fast he was."

Rainey says, "It's been a big challenge to me personally, because the way I have to try and go fast in this thing is so unorthodox from what I'm used to. It's like I'm racing myself. My brain is telling me what to do, but my body won't do it. You have to have 'em both working in harmony. When I'm racing, I'm always double-checking my thoughts. 'Do you really want to go through this corner flat-out in fifth?' My brain does, but my body can't tell if it's the right thing to do. So I back off. I'm not nearly as fast as I know I can go."

That's dangerous thinking for Rainey, who admits his obsession to go 11/10ths to beat arch nemesis Kevin Schwantz (and beat him badly) led to his career-ending mistake at Misano. His competitive fire, mixed with horsepower, has traditionally been a recipe for self-destruction.

Not this time, he cautions. Besides, karts are much safer than bikes.

"When you spin out in these," he smiles, "your elbows don't leak [blood]." (When motorcycles spin out, the rider's elbows, knees, and other appendages are usually the friction pads that bring him to a stop.)

Although Lawson maintains that he and his old rival tone it down a notch or two--"No running into, or over, each other. Keep your distance. No banging wheels"--there is a natural tendency to try their best.

"Out on the track, in the heat of the moment, Wayne's just another kart in the way. He looks at me the same way," Lawson says. "A racer's always a racer."

These two motorcycle legends, with seven world titles and literally hundreds of race victories between them, now dazzle the Southern California karting community with their antics. Their races are always close, hard-fought, fiercely contested, and a prize to win.

"I still set my goals fairly high with this kart," Rainey admits.

It's high-stakes poker for Rainey, who fears another jolt could render him a quadriplegic. Several years ago, he lost all feeling briefly when he fell backward out of his wheelchair. He adds, "This kart is fast, and I know things can happen. If anything was gonna happen, I'd rather it happen doing what I love, or want to be doing, instead of somebody taking me out while I'm just on the way to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk.

"This is like going racing again, to me. It's enough to keep me wanting to come back for a little bit more each time. It's a challenge going through a fifth-gear corner flat, when I can only feel the handlebars in my hands and nothing else -- kinda like it was when I raced bikes.

"It's fun. It's a big risk. It's a challenge. I'm not gonna be able to find that doing anything else."

Buttonwillow Raceway Park. A tough track on the outskirts of Bakersfield. The sun is blazing hot, and everybody's bitching about it. Kart engines are exploding. Tires are blistering. Drivers are dehydrating. It's a classic "Rainey day." When the weather's wretched, Rainey has traditionally been at his best.

In the heat race, Lawson blisters his tires. The early leader runs out of gas. Who comes out of the pack to win? The guy who never thought he'd see another checkered flag.

"We went running over to Wayne and lifted his face shield," Lawson remembers. "Wayne had tears in his eyes. He told me, 'Thanks. I never thought I'd feel butterflies again.'"

For the first time in six years, Rainey says, "I didn't feel disabled."

Lawson says, "I just wanted to do something for him. Put a smile on his face again. That kinda made it all worthwhile."